Ozleft
An independent forum of strategy, tactics and history in the Australian left, green and labour movements
Contents
  • What's new
  • Australian left
  • Bob Gould's writings
  • Discussion
  • DSP 2005-06
  • Events
  • History
  • Reading
  • Reviews
  • Site index
  • Environment, ecosocialism
  • Political campaigns
  • News sources
  • Theory
    Left links
  • International
  • Australia
  • New Zealand
  • Trade unions
    • Blogs
  • Jenny's Red News
  • Leftwrites
    • Discussion sites
  • ALP Soapbox
  • Broad Left
  • Marxmail
  • Your Rights at Work

    • Ozleft home
    John Percy's industrial philosopher's stone
    By Bob Gould

    The content of John Percy's History of the DSP and Resistance suggests that all questions in the history of the socialist movement are now judged by the writer from the standpoint of whether they conform to the present-day DSP's permanent ultraleftism towards the Labor Party.

    On page 30, discussing the coal strike of 1949, Percy offers this imperishable piece of alleged Marxist analysis: "In 1949 the CPA led a seven-week coal strike, over important issues of wages and conditions, which began with strong rank-and-file support. The bosses, their newspapers and the Chifley ALP government waged an all-out attack. Chifley sent troops into the mines to break the strike. The CPA simplistically assessed the defeat as due to its 'sectarianism' towards the ALP. The Cold War anti-communist onslaught was bearing down, and the bosses were determined to smash the CPA and militant unions whether they fought back or not. Perhaps it was better to fight and lose, rather than capitulate without a whimper."

    What an irresponsible, light-minded commentator on industrial matters lifetime DSP General Secretary Percy is. From his modest office, Percy passes sweeping judgement on the issues in the coal strike without offering any evidence for his view.

    The first thing that has to be said is that the Trotskyists of the time, who had considerable industrial experience, were critical of the CPA tactics in the coal strike. The second thing that has to be said is that the CPA was an utterly serious, although Stalinist, party with vastly more widespread implantation in the trade union movement than has ever been achieved by the DSP.

    The tactics and strategy adopted by the Communist Party in the coal strike are among the most widely analysed and discussed issues in the history of the Australian labour movement.

    The literature satisfactorily establishes that while there were many unfulfilled workers' demands in the mining industry, the launching of a strike in head-on confrontation with the Chifley Labor government, at a moment when the industrial upsurge of the post-war years was declining rapidly, was due to a political decision taken essentially by the leadership of the CPA.

    Had the leadership of the CPA taken a more cautious approach, they could have tipped the balance in the miners' union against launching an indefinite strike in rather adverse conditions.

    The strike came a year after Lance Sharkey's 1948 speech at a meeting of Communist parties in Southeast Asia in which he, obviously in consultation with Moscow, applauded their launching of insurrections in several countries.

    In 1949 the CPA leadership seriously thought that a social revolution in Australia, led by themselves, was possible and relatively imminent. It was in that framework that, disposing of far more forces in the labour movement than the DSP has ever had, the CPA took major initiatives that led to an indefinite coal strike.

    The results were disastrous. The miners lost the strike, right-wingers displaced the CPA leaders in the Miners' Federation for a couple of years, and the Chifley Government fell, to be replaced by the Menzies Liberal government, which held power for 23 years. CPA union leaders lost positions in a number of other unions, some of which were never regained, and the left in the trade union movement was generally weakened.

    The coal strike had significant repercussions on the left of the Labor Party. In the immediate postwar years the CPA had been rebuilding influence among a re-emerging left in the ALP, particularly in NSW. This rebuilding of a Labor left influenced by the CPA had been a difficult process after the split of the NSW Labor Party under CPA influence away from the ALP in 1940-41.

    One aspect of the CPA's growing ultraleftism around 1949 was a happily brief mini-Third Period concerning the ALP from about 1948 to 1951. As the coal strike developed, the CPA practised a classic "united front from below" tactic, encouraging its supporters in the Labor Party to conduct a revolt of the branches in support of the miners, and to split away from the Labor Party.

    For one account of this, see Roger Millis's useful book, Serpent's Tooth, in which he describes the experiences of his father, Bruce Millis, an undercover member of the CPA in the Labor Party in Prime Minister Ben Chifley's electorate.

    A smallish split from the ALP was led by the Paddington branch, whose main personality was the tally clerk Tom Morey, and by the Summer Hill branch, with Jack Heffernan as president and Mary Greenland (Hall Greenland's redoubtable agitator mother) as secretary. After the CPA ditched its mini-Third Period strategy and the split with the Groupers unfolded, most of the left-wing militants involved in this split moved back into the Labor Party.

    Tom Morey ended up a leftist Labor member of parliament for the state seat of Bligh. Jack Heffernan, an official of the Sheetmetal Workers Union, became a leader of the left-wing Steering Committee faction of the Labor Party and ended up a leftist member of the NSW executive. Mary Greenland, an extraordinary woman, became my close associate in the Vietnam Action Campaign in the late 1960s and I eventually made the major tribute speech at her funeral.

    All the ALP leftists who had been involved in the 1949 split over the coal strike, that I knew (and I knew a lot of them) later viewed the split as a big mistake.

    The later political discussion in the CPA about a balancesheet on the coal strike was also in part a discussion of the mistaken view that the CPA was in a position to launch a bid for power in Australia in 1949.

    For the CPA, it was a relatively responsible and serious discussion. Eventually Jack Blake and Jack Henry were made the internal scapegoats for mistaken policies, which was typical of the way things went in the Stalinist movement.

    Nevertheless, the lessons of the coal strike were widely discussed in the CPA and on the left in general. The CPA recognised that launching an indefinite strike in the coal industry at that time was a mistake. This discussion and its outcome was actually the beginning of the departure of the CPA from absolute control by Moscow.

    There is considerable literature about the coal strike, to which Percy does not refer in any serious way. He just reduces it simply to the question of the Labor Party, which is ignorant and myopic. It was first and foremost a question of industrial strategy. The political aspects are only comprehenisble in that context.

    The most useful book on the coal strike is the 100-page collection by Phillip Deery, published by Hale and Iremonger in 1978, called Labor in Conflict: The  1949 Coal Strike. It consists mainly of documents, plus a number of illustrations. The bibliography is very useful.

    On the tactics of the CPA in the strike, some references are to Alistair Davidson's Short History of the CPA (Stanford 1969) and Robin Gollan's Revolutionaries and Reformists (Canberra 1975). Also mentioned are Edgar Ross's History of the Miners Federation (Sydney 1970) and Robin Gollan's The Coalminers of NSW (Melbourne 1963).

    The CPA's reassessments are listed as E.A. Bacon, Outline History of the CPA (Brisbane 1966), Ralph Gibson's My Years in the Communist Party (Melbourne 1966), Lance Sharkey's The Trade Unions (Sydney 1959) and Bernie Taft's Postwar Industrial Policy, (Australian Left Review, no 28, Dec-Jan 1971).

    All of these leftist sources take the view that launching an unlimited strike in the conditions of the time was a mistake and they give cogenct argument as to why it was a mistake. Most of those sources acknowledge that the strike was essentially a political initiative by the CPA leadership.

    John Percy's cavalier and ignorant neglect of the literature on this question, while making a sweeping judgement, is political clownishness of the highest order. What a light-minded approach it is for a Marxist leader, such as lifetime DSP General Secretary Percy, to say it was better to "fight and lose than capitulate without a whimper".

    Percy is so contemptuous of serious issues in the labour movement that he doesn't even try to elaborate on his, stupidly, tendentiously framed statement. Percy has no serious interest in, or detailed knowledge of, such industrial questions. He only engages in very general demagogy to make a dubious political point.

    The alternatives, of course, weren't to launch an unlimited strike or to "capitulate without a whimper". The CPA, which at the trade union level was a very serious outfit, could have continued and intensified the industrial campaign for the miners' demands rather than launching an unlimited strike.

    Those were the options that were subsequently discussed in the CPA and on the left in drawing a balancesheet on 1949.

    All of the above raises the question of the industrial history of the DSP and of General Secretary John and of deceased DSP eminent person Jim Percy.

    The crude historiography that permeates Percy's book throws into bold relief how the Percy brothers and the modern DSP leadership have always viewed the interests and role of their organisation, vis a vis serious implantation in the trade unions. The constant preoccupation with a public exposure posture of Laborism, as the philosopher's stone of Percy's book, raises inevitably the major industrial incidents in the history of the DSP.

    There has only been one ongoing industrial agitation conducted largely by the DSP that the DSP didn't pull out of in a relatively short time, and that was the lengthy agitation in the mines of the west coast of Tasmania, associated with the activities of Ian Jamieson.

    It's possible to put a moment on when I began my current argument with the DSP leadership on industrial and political strategy in the labour movement. That moment was when, at a DSP conference about five years ago, I heard Sue Bull deliver a bizarre justification of the DSP leadership's adventure in smashing up the integration of DSP members in the Wollongong steelworks, and in the left wing of the Ironworkers' Union, by imposing on them an irresponsible electoral challenge to the then most left-wing union leadership in the country, who happened to be the left-wing stronghold in the right-dominated Ironworkers Union.

    This incident is discussed in at some length by George Petersen in his self-published autobiography, the relevant excerpt of which is available on Ozleft.

    In July 2002, at a seminar on Trotskyism in Australia, some former members of the DSP and a number of other leftists with a Trotskyist background discussed that industrial experience. The gathering heard reminiscences of two centrally involved then-DSP participants in the events in Wollongong, and one who had been in the Newcastle steelworks.

    (Serious students of the industrial history of the Trotskyist movement in the English-speaking world will be struck by the similarity of the intervention of the DSP leadership under Jim Percy in the struggles in the Ironworkers Union and the way the temporary majority of Burnham and others on the political committee of the US SWP in 1939 instructed the autoworkers' fraction to support the notorious right-winger Homer Martin in the factional war in their union, despite the overwhelming opposition of the fraction to that line of action. This event became known in the US SWP as the Autoworkers Crisis, and was quickly reversed because of the revolt of the SWP autoworkers. John Percy and his late brother weren't as good students of the history of the US SWP as they claimed to be, or they wouldn't have imposed such a line of action on the DSP ironworkers in Wollongong, more or less against the views of the majority of the fraction members.)

    The participants in the Trotskyism seminar remembered the very direct intervention of Jim Percy, with all his authority in the very tightly run SWP, to force through this tactical change on the steelworkers' fraction, which to say the least had severe misgivings about it.

    The comrade who had been in the Newcastle steelworks described how Jim Percy had explained the situation differently to the steelworker members of the DSP in Newcastle and Wollongong. The same story apparently wouldn't wash in both centres.

    The justification advanced by Jim Percy and the DSP leadership was the crisis in the steel industry produced by large-scale retrenchments. The DSP leadership argued that the only way to defeat the layoffs was an indefinite strike for the nationalisation of the steelworks under workers control, and since the union leadership wouldn't lead such a strike, the DSP had to launch an electoral challenge to that leadership.

    This was presented as a moral question, rather out of space and time. Unlike the CPA in the coal industry in 1949 the DSP leadership didn't have sufficient influence to get within cooee of being able to initiate an indefinite strike.

    The actual outcome was that the DSP-led Militant Action Group got about one sixth of the votes in Wollongong, where there was a very high turnout, the DSP was totally isolated from the rest of the left and seen as political wreckers, which in this instance they were. Even worse, the developing national challenge to the right-wing leadership of the Ironworkers Union was disrupted, and within a comparatively short time, rather soured by the experience, most of the DSP steelworkers left the industry and over time left the DSP.

    Internal DSP mythology, demonstrated by Sue Bull's curious lecture, presents this disastrous piece of industrial adventurism as a great achievement.

    The important question here is that in the DSP, industrial questions are viewed extremely instrumentally, and in a rather idealist way. Industrial or electoral tactics are presented as high-flown moral imperatives, which cuts across practical Marxist tactics in trade union matters.

    In trade union activity, serious Marxists give great weight to the objective conditions, the balance of class forces and the likely response of the workers in the industry to particular initiatives.

    In the Wollongong steelworks in 1982 it was reasonably clear that it was impossible to get mass support for an indefinite strike over redundancies. At the 2002 seminar on the history of Trotskyism, those who had been involved in the Wollongong experience were, it's fair to say, genuinely a bit puzzled as to what motivated the DSP leadership, and particularly Jim Percy, in forcing on the steelworkers' fraction a course that was clearly going to blow up the civilised relationship with the left-wing leaders of the Wollongong ironworkers, and have bad effects on the support of the Ironworkers Union leadership in Wollongong for the Jobs for Women campaign, which was strongly influenced by the DSP.

    After a lengthy discussion at the 2002 Trotskyism seminar, the main conclusion was that Jim Percy was afraid that the DSP members in the Wollongong steelworks would be drawn out of party activity into mainly union activity, and that the enforced electoral tactic was a deliberate way of blowing up the relationship of the DSP members with the rest of the left in that city, which in Percy's view was becoming too cosy.

    In the event, the outcome was the opposite of that desired by Jim and John Percy and the DSP leadership of the time. Most of the cannon fodder in that series of event left the DSP and the steel industry fairly quickly rather than being drawn back into intense DSP activity, which seems to have been the aim of the leadership.

    The significance of this old DSP history for current events

    I juxtapose the above two issues deliberately. The significance for the current industrial-political situation of John Percy's revealing remark about the coal strike is pretty obvious. When you associate this remark with the events in the steel industry in 1982, and you examine closely those events, which are still regarded internally in the DSP as a seminal DSP industrial struggle, a distinct pattern emerges of subordination of the necessary dynamics of industrial struggle and agitation to the narrow organisational interests of the DSP as a group.

    This pattern is still strongly apparent in the way the DSP leadership prosecutes, as a matter of principle, an ultraleft policy towards most labour movement institutions despite the obvious need of the moment, which is the maximum united mobilisation against the Howard Government's industrial proposals.

    John Percy's ignorant and dangerous throwaway remark on the coal strike, in a book published a couple of months ago, reveals quite clearly the basic irresponsibility of the DSP leadership's approach to industrial struggle, and that's a dangerous thing in current industrial circumstances.
    Ozleft home

    Comments welcome. Ozleft Bob Gould

    Hit counter
    Since June 26, 2005